Carleton: WARP for people who didn't like math class

From Russell Carleton at Baseball Prospectus on October 2, 2012:

Over the weekend, there were plenty of end-of-season retrospectives from columnists who cast non-existent ballots for the MVPs, Cy Young award winners, and Rookies of the Year. As might be expected, many of the columnists brought up the WARP (Mike Trout) vs. Triple Crown (Miguel Cabrera) angle. There was a common theme running through the pieces that argued for Cabrera: WARP is a complicated and math-heavy stat, and because it is so complicated, how can we be sure that Trout was actually the better player?

WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player) does take a little bit of math to arrive at, and not everyone enjoyed math class in high school, but it's actually a pretty simple theory. In the spirit of fairness, I will lay out the basic idea behind WARP. You can make up your own mind from there.